Last night, the Dixie Chicks kicked off the North American leg of their MMXVI tour, their fourth headlining tour across the United States. Sixteen years ago, they launched their first, in support of their second major label release, Fly.

Released in 1998, Wide Open Spaces established the Dixie Chicks as superstars right out of the gate. It produced five top ten hits, including three #1 singles, and sold more than twelve million copies in the United States alone. It remains their biggest selling album to date. But is it among their best?

Here’s hoping you haven’t gotten completely burned out on countdowns yet. 2009 was hardly a favorite musical year for many of us, but amid each year’s glut of throwaway items, there’s always a good’un or two (or forty). The following is the first installment of our Best Singles of 2009 list, which will conclude tomorrow morning. Best Albums will follow next week.

As with the Singles of the Decade feature, this countdown has been compiled through combination of four equally weighed Top 20 lists by Kevin, Leeann, Tara and myself. An inverted point system was applied to the individual rankings (#1 on a list meant 20 points, while #20 on the list meant 1 point). The songs were then ranked together by number of total points, greatest to least. The final result is another rather stylistically diverse set.

As always, we hope you enjoy the countdown, and welcome all the feedback you can muster. Happy New Year!

#40

Lady Antebellum, “Need You Now”

The trio puts a country spin on an old school pop sound, but without forsaking raw emotion. The highlight of the song is Hillary Scott’s smoky performance, which draws out all the anguish and regret you’d expect from a desperate, 1 AM lover’s call. – Tara Seetharam

While I’m always interested in learning the story behind a song, I generally insist that a song must be able to stand on its own without the support of a back story to prop it up. In that vein, I typically balk against unconfirmed assertions regarding motivations for a song as a justification for the song’s existence. With that said, it would be remiss of me to deny that a confirmed story behind a song often positively helps to inform an artist’s performance of the said song.

Therefore, it’s not farfetched to assume that Charlie Robison’s fairly recent divorce from Dixie Chick, Emily Robison, has had a tangible effect on the maudlin “Reconsider”, which was recorded in the aftermath of the highly publicized 2008 divorce. While Robison did not write the song, his emotion is palpable enough to make us forget such a technical detail.